Hunters in the Dark (20 page)

“It's perfectly all right,” Robert said.

He was enjoying it immensely.

“Well,” Sar said, blowing out a complete smoke ring, “time will tell. If I am talking rubbish, time will tell. And I never talk to anyone anyway. The white people would be horrified if they heard. But we came to help—we're sincere. You know how people think.”

The doctor laughed and flicked his ash. They began to eat chocolates and brandy and the stars became noticeably clearer. The talk became gentler and more personal. Robert felt more at home, and for a moment he thought that he could also belong to this family one day. It was far from being an impossible idea.

Davuth came down to the river at about noon and began his search for the man called Thy. He was not difficult to find. “He's always up in the bar getting drunk,” the other boatmen told him.

There indeed Davuth found him, sitting alone and drinking shots of Sang Som diluted with dirty ice. He collared him in a friendly way and they got talking. The rains had held off that day and the whole room, the whole disheveled river hamlet, was filled with burning, corrosive light. Davuth was in his one good suit, neat and combed and shaved, and he had the look of a mildly respectable contractor on his way to the city. He had been up since dawn and he felt sharp and prepared. He had left his car with a man he knew and walked unnoticed into the jetty area. It was a new adventure, but it was it was more than a mere adventure. It was the beginning of a new life.

“You can take me down to the city,” Davuth said to the drunk now, “and I'll pay you what the American pays.”

Thy looked away and into his dirty ice as if mention of the American was mysterious bad luck.

“He pays better than anyone.”

“Yeah, well, I'll pay the same.”

It was a deal and Davuth asked him sternly if he was sober.

“Of course I'm sober,” Thy said defiantly.

They went down to his boat tied up at the jetty and set off with the sun at their backs. Davuth sat next to him in the cabin and they chatted with rum and cigarettes and Thy told him all about the young barang he had taken down to the city a short while ago.

“How about that American?” Davuth asked. “I heard about him. Wasn't he some drug dealer down here?”

“He was but he took off. I heard—”

Thy's face tightened and he glanced down at the hands of the policeman, which were resting passively but somehow dangerously in his lap.

“You heard what?”

“I heard they fished him out of the river.”

“They did?”

“He must have crossed the drug dealers in Pailin.”

“I guess he must have.”

“It's not a smart thing to do.”

“It's the stupidest thing to do, all right. But you had a few dealings with him. Tell me about him.”

“Why?”

“I'm just curious. I heard a lot of stories.”

Thy was now drinking heavily. There was a chance, surely, that they would capsize at some point but it couldn't be helped. Davuth poured out the booze and Delons.

“He was a dealer, I'm sure. But I liked him. He was all right. He paid me good. You can't ask more than that.”

“No, you can't ask more than that.”

“He paid me for odd jobs. Between you and me—”

“Yes?”

“A few drop-offs, you know—that kind of thing.”

“I see.”

“Yeah, it was all right. He wasn't a tightfist.”

“You can't ask more than that.”

“You bet you can't. He paid dollars.”

Davuth said that that was the best a man could hope for: dollars with no questions asked.

“You got that right,” Thy said.

“And that British boy you took down to the city—”

“Ah, he was a queer one.”

“Why so?”

“Slept most of the way. Maybe he was stoned when we loaded him on the boat.”

“You and the American?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you do something like that?”

The boatman looked over at Davuth and his eyes went blank.

“Don't ask me!”

“How strange,” Davuth drawled. “Did the kid know where he was going?”

“He seemed to have no idea.”

“I'll be damned—”

“He just got off at the jetty where the American told me to let him off.”

“Then take me to the same place.”

“You said you'd pay the same.”

“It's a promise.”

They drank a fair bit more on their way to the jetty. Somehow the day had passed altogether by the time they got there and the lights had come on in the waterfront shacks and birds swarmed the mulberry trees with a deafening chirping and fluttering. Davuth paid and they went together up to the bank, the boatman staggering and mocking himself, and Davuth took his leave brusquely and went in among the drivers who were hanging out under the babbling trees. He sifted through them asking about the English boy and seeing if any of them remembered him. Since there were very few of them it didn't take long for him to find the one who had driven Robert into Phnom Penh. Davuth took him to one side and used all his matey charm on him. He offered a pretty good tip if the man could take him to the same hotel he had taken the young barang to.

“Sure,” the man said cheerfully. “It was the Sakura, if I remember correctly.”

“Then let's go to the Sakura.”

It was a chaotic drive. The road was clogged with long-distance trucks. The dusk came upon them. The man chatted glibly. Davuth listened to the stories about his family and then casually asked him if he had noticed anything odd about the young barang he had taken to the Sakura that night. The driver caught Davuth's eye in the rearview mirror and he wondered if the barang had contracted a debt he couldn't pay. The man in the backseat looked like a genial enforcer. The driver prevaricated and then admitted that he couldn't remember much about the foreigner except that he looked quite broke.

“I see,” Davuth said quietly. “But he paid you all the same?”

“He did pay me. He paid twice what you paid.”

They laughed. Davuth leaned over and passed another two dollars to the man. When they came into the city the driver remembered that it had not been the Sakura after all but the Paris on Kampuchea Krom. When they got there Davuth asked him again about the Englishman and the driver said he had had no bags with him. It was an extraordinary thing. A barang with no bags.

Yes, Davuth said to him, it's an extraordinary thing. With that, he turned and walked boldly into the lobby of the Paris, ignoring the drivers outside. The two girls on duty at the reception desk looked up with an instinctive alarm. Davuth gave off an energy that commanded alertness and wariness, if not a slight distaste that the person seeing him for the first time could not quite pin down. A briskness in the hands, a crisp gait that was nevertheless rarely hurried. He never put women at ease. He set down his bag and smiled, however.

“I'd like a room,” he said.

One of the girls took him up to the fifth floor.

“Have you been here before?” she asked him as they climbed the stairwells. On the higher landings the dolled-up girls parted for them sullenly.

“I don't come down much to the city these days. My daughter's at school and I never have the time.”

“Lucky you.”

“She's a lovely girl.”

“Here on holiday?”

“Business.”

“Ah, I see. Business…”

They came to the fifth-floor landing and its row of tarnished doors and smell of ashtrays, and as they went down it he said, “Did you have a barang staying here recently? A young kid named Robert?”

She stopped and their eyes met in the semi-gloom near an exit light.

“No, I don't think so.”

“Maybe that wasn't his name.”

She took out the key and continued walking to the door, which she opened quietly.

“Maybe it was Simon, his name.”

“I don't remember all the names,” she said.

“You have a lot of young guys staying here for the girls?”

“All ages.”

“But not a lot of young barangs?”

“A fair number. They like the girls too.”

Davuth smiled.

“So it's rumored. But you'd notice a good-looking young one.”

He closed the door behind them and threw his bag onto the bed. He went up to her and passed a ten-dollar bill into her hand.

“He hasn't done anything wrong,” he said. “I just want to know if he was here.”

She nodded and absorbed the bill.

“Which room?”

“The one next to this.”

“Can I change rooms?”

She hesitated. “I think there might be someone in there.”

They listened, and the comical nature of the pause made them both smile. An old Chinese guy getting off with one of the spinners?

“I think it's empty,” she said. “Let me call down and check.”

When she had done so she took him next door to the other room and let him in. He threw his bag onto the bed a second time and strode to the windows, pulled open the curtains and looked down at the boulevard alive in its evening glory. The trees glittered with a golden light. The KTV was lit up. One forgot how both Chinese and French parts of the city felt as night fell. He thanked the girl and asked her again if she remembered anything about the barang occupant of the room and then asked her, in a different tone, if she wouldn't mind keeping this all between them. He assured her that there was no sinister reason for his asking this. It was just discretion, which benefited everyone. She agreed and he watched her slip away with a malicious satisfaction in the power of ten-dollar bills. Then he locked the door and set to searching the room on his hands and knees.

The carpets had not been cleaned in a while and yet after half an hour he had found nothing. He went through the bathroom, found nothing again, and then showered. Drying off, he lay on the bed and smoked and looked up at the yellowed furnishings. So the English barang had moved on, but to where had he moved? Davuth had refrained from asking the girl point-blank; it would make him look suspicious. Now he went down to the lobby and found that the girls had left for the night and a male clerk was there. Man to man was a little easier. He tried the ten dollars again and got the man to talk about recent arrivals and departures and soon he had found S. Beauchamp in the book but no forwarding address. The man told him to try the drivers outside. The same guys were always there.

Davuth went into the street and the drivers tossed him a few words. He lit up and puffed a bit and waited for them to calm down. He strolled over and asked if they knew the English boy. One of them said that he had taken him around a bit.

“A blond kid about twenty-eight?”

“I took him to Colonial Mansions.”

“What's that?”

The man offered to take him there.

“Then let's go,” Davuth said. “Is it a hotel?”

“It's serviced apartments.”

“Fine,” Davuth cried, and patted the man on the back.

He was rather enjoying himself now.

They drove through a dry, early-winter evening with the rain now holding off. The boulevards swarming, the lights temporarily reliable and on. The rain would come later that night, but for now it was merciful. The lovely nights of winter were coming.

The new karaokes overflowed, the Koreans and Japanese and Chinese abundant. The tuk-tuks filled with barang families and haughty Khmer-Chinese girls in long silk dresses studiously turned away from eye contact.

He had come along that same boulevard many times thirty-five years earlier and he always remembered whenever he was there. The people alive now, the young, did not understand anything about the city they inhabited. They didn't know its underlying nature. It was as if centuries had passed since then. In Year Zero of the Revolution that same teeming city had been almost entirely empty. The government ministries, the S-21 prison, a few posts here and there—at night it was as dark as the countryside, you could walk through it without meeting any human life. It was a city of torches and whispers. There were fires at the corners, patrols threading their way through the labyrinth. Strange to recall, he had felt very safe there. It was not unlike the village from which he had come. On sandals cut from old tires, one could walk silently, one could go unnoticed. Even the electric light of the present incarnation of the city struck him as faintly incredible, absurd. A complicated joke designed to humiliate the previous generations. When he thought of the things he had seen as a teenage soldier along those same wide streets it made him wonder if sanity was even possible in this world. The men casually shot at street corners during comatose sunlit afternoons and were taken away on carts. An eighty-year-old grocer begging for his life under the trees on Street 19, then bayoneted by teenagers. Just momentary visions glimpsed for a split second, like the symbols on playing cards. The nights when the city sank into silent darkness, seemingly unpopulated. The buildings emptied out, where they roamed and slept and played cards and shot dogs. Rumors: a foreigner being held at S-21, one of two Australian yachtsmen captured off the coast, forced into a tire on Mao Tse-tung Boulevard and burned alive.

Davuth had been attached to the M-13 camp in the jungle so he was already habituated to this system. To save you is no gain, to kill you is no loss! The blood debt! He wondered now—speeding along this capitalist boulevard—if he had ever believed in Communism. For what was Communism? The movement had begun one fine day in 1968 with the attack on Bay Daram, a few miles from his parents' house in Battambang. It had even emerged, then, from his own region. He was only ten but news of the attack went around like wildfire. It was the first modest move of the Angkar, the first blood drawn. But the Angkar was deeper than Communism; it came out of the distant past. Under the Angkar, sleep itself was prohibited. Ever since he had had trouble sleeping. He thought of it as “rest,” as if the illegality of sleep had been established in his subconscious and could not now be uprooted. And so for the rest of his life he had been almost continuously wide awake. How many nights he and his patrol had wandered across the city hunting in the dark for traitors, for bourgeois elements, for saboteurs and trash who he already knew did not exist. They had freedom to kill whoever they wanted. If they heard a noise in an empty building they went in and killed the rats and the dogs, and sometimes an old woman sleeping on newspapers. The hunt itself was the meaning of Angkar.